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Virginia Mixed Pickle
1 peck green tomatoes. 1 firm head cabbage. 12 white onions. 2 dozen cucumbers. 6 pods green pepper. 1 pint horseradish.
Put on board and chop with large knife. Mix all well together and put in granite or stone bowl. Sprinkle a pint of salt over all, let stand over night, put in bag to drain well. Then pour over weak vinegar. Let stand over night. Then press out all the vinegar. Take two pounds light brown sugar, one gallon strong apple vinegar, one ounce celery seed, two ounces tumeric, two ounces white mustard seed, 25-cent bottle Durkee's mustard dressing. Boil pickle slowly for three-fourths hour, put in jars and cover with the vinegar. Seal tight.
A full-scale end-of-garden chow-chow, written for a household that put up pickles by the crock. Nearly everything here needs translating, starting with the quantities.
- A peck is a lotA peck is 8 dry quarts, roughly 10-12 lb of green tomatoes. With the cabbage, two dozen cucumbers and the rest, the finished batch runs to several gallons. Quarter the whole thing if you want a manageable amount.
- The salt is a draw, not a seasoningA pint of salt is about a pound. It pulls water out of the vegetables overnight; the drained brine carries most of it away. Rinse the drained vegetables and taste before the final boil rather than trusting the ratio blind.
- Weak vinegar vs. strongThe overnight soak in "weak vinegar" appears to serve as a rinse and firming step and can be done with any 5% cider vinegar cut half with water. The "strong apple vinegar" for the syrup should be full-strength 5% cider vinegar, undiluted; that acidity is what keeps the finished pickle safe.
- Durkee's mustard dressingA prepared creamy mustard sauce of the kind still sold. Substitute about a cup of a mild prepared mustard sauce or salad-style mustard.
- Turmeric and celery seed by weightTwo ounces of ground turmeric is roughly half a cup, and an ounce of celery seed about four tablespoons. Both are in proportion to the volume of pickle here, and the turmeric is what gives it the standard mustard-pickle yellow.
- HorseradishA pint most likely means freshly grated root rather than the vinegar-packed jarred sauce, though bottled horseradish was on sale by this date. If you use jarred, drain it and expect a milder result, since grated horseradish loses its heat once bottled.
- Granite or stone bowl"Granite" means graniteware, that is, enamelled steel. The point is a non-reactive vessel: enamel, glass or stainless. Bare aluminium, copper or cast iron will discolour the turmeric and take on a metallic taste from the salt and vinegar.
- Chop, do not processThe instruction to chop on a board with a large knife matters. A food processor turns green tomatoes and cabbage to slush, and the pickle needs distinct pieces to survive 45 minutes of simmering.
- Sealing"Seal tight" reflects 1920 practice, when a hot pack into a hot jar was considered sufficient. Current practice is to fill to a half-inch headspace and process the sealed jars in a boiling-water bath, 15 minutes for pints, which guards against mould and yeast on the surface during storage.
- Rest itMustard pickle is harsh straight from the pot. Give it a month in a cool dark place before opening.
This is a chow-chow, the Southern and mid-Atlantic branch of the same family as English piccalilli: a mixed pickle of chopped garden vegetables bound in a turmeric-and-mustard vinegar. Its reason for existing is written into the first line -- green tomatoes, the fruit still on the vine when frost threatens and no longer able to ripen, along with the last cucumbers and a late cabbage. Recipes of this kind circulated by name and region rather than by author, and "Virginia" here signals a style, not a documented origin. Mary A. Wilson's New Cook Book (1920) belongs to the period when American home cooking was shifting from crocks in the cellar to glass jars with screw bands, and the vagueness of the sealing instruction is typical of the transition. The bottled Durkee's dressing is worth noticing too: a commercial condiment folded straight into a homemade preserve, which is the sort of detail that dates a recipe more precisely than any date on the title page. The page is filed under Candy, for reasons the book itself does not explain.